The Essential Guide to Product Data Tracking for Marketers

Gone are the days of hyper-focus on acquiring net new pipeline. In the post-ZIRP era, a major chunk of growth comes from your customers. This shift means we need to make some crucial changes in the marketing function to be effective.

When we are just interacting with prospects, data like website activity, CRM / enrichment, etc., is the required data set to do marketing well. However, a whole different data set is required when interacting with customers/users and that is anchored by product activity.

Understanding Product Data Tracking As A Marketer

When I say product data or product activity data, I am talking about any action a user takes in your SaaS product that can be recorded as product activity data. Think about the event of a user logging in, using a specific feature, etc.

To get started on the path to product-led communications, you first need to find out how your company tracks product data.

Every business implements tools for data tracking and analysis depending on various factors. Here’s an overview to help you understand how your data tracking tool implementation is:

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) vs. Product Analytics Providers

CDPs (E.g., Segment)

CDPs collect and unify customer data from multiple touch points, providing a single view of the customer. CDPs typically can be used to track events across the customer journey, from website visits to purchase behaviors.

Product Analytics Platforms (E.g., Amplitude, Pendo)

There are some differences in how these platforms and tools work. There can be tools that are specifically implemented to track detailed user actions and product usage and tools that are implemented to log interactions like button clicks.

An analytics platform like Amplitude tracks and analyzes user behavior through events, providing insights into feature usage and user engagement. Whereas Pendo is often used for logging button clicks and user interactions with the product interface. And helps trigger in-product experiences to drive engagement. However, their effectiveness depends on how they are implemented for the particular use case.

🎯 Action Items:

1. You need to ask your engineering team if you have CDP and analytics platforms set up and how they are implemented.
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2. If it's only tracking clicks for product analytics, it might not be sufficient for marketing purposes. You need to ask them to implement comprehensive event tracking to capture meaningful product interactions.

Data Warehouses vs. Direct Database Access

Direct Database Access (E.g., Postgres, MySQL)

Data might be stored directly in these operational databases, but accessing and analyzing this data can be challenging without the right tools and expertise.

The biggest disadvantage for you, if your business employs only a database, is that the data may be siloed and difficult to extract for marketing purposes without additional integration or querying support.

💡Tip: If your data is locked in databases like Postgres or MySQL, ask your engineering team to push this data into the data warehouse. But, if you already have a CDP, Segment is a good example, make sure the CDP integrates with your marketing systems.

Data Warehouses (E.g., Snowflake)

These are centralized repositories designed for large-scale data storage and complex queries. They aggregate data from various sources, making it accessible and analyzable for marketing and other business functions. It is easier access to comprehensive datasets for analysis and reporting.

If you are a larger B2B business, it’s likely that you already have a data warehouse. With a data warehouse, it is easier for you to get visibility into product and user data if you don’t have a CDP. Ask around to see if a data warehouse exists and who the owner might be. It could be product, engineering, or a dedicated data team.

Judging Your Current Setup

Once you find out how your current data tracking and storage works, you can interpret your current setup in the following ways.

Best scenarios for your product data setup:

• You have a CDP like Segment connected to your data source. This CDP integrates with your marketing systems.

OR

• A data warehouse is housing data from your primary data source. All the analytics platforms and marketing systems are connected to it.

Good scenario for your product data setup:

Your product data is stored in a database like Postgres and you do NOT have a CDP that integrates with your marketing systems or a data warehouse.

🎯 Action item:  Ask for a data warehouse to be set up on top of the database or implement a CDP.

Either of the above three scenarios is good news for Marketing because they allow centralization of data with the data warehouse and seamless integration with marketing system-friendly CDP to allow access and flow of data. Automating workflows such as product activity-triggered emails becomes smooth sailing with these setups.

Any other product data orchestration might not be the ideal scenario for Marketing to execute product-led campaigns suited for all use cases and customer life cycle stages.

If your current setup makes it easy for the marketing team to have access to product activity data in a usable format, your marketing and product teams are well-aligned. If not, you need to work on Marketing and Product alignment.

Next Steps

Marketing’s role has evolved significantly in the product-led growth (PLG) era. Even if you’re in a traditional sales-led business, understanding and leveraging product data has become essential for creating effective campaigns, improving user engagement, and driving business growth.

However, poor Marketing and Product alignment can hinder a company’s ability to fully understand and meet customer needs, ultimately impacting acquisition, retention, and most importantly, expansion.

After figuring out how your data infrastructure is set up you need to assess your current state of alignment with the product team.  If poorly aligned, you need to start working on Marketing and Product alignment as a priority to get access to the required product data.

If you are well aligned with your product team, you need to check out Inflection.io. Inflection is a marketing automation platform that lets you activate your product data and data warehouse to drive more pipeline, product adoption, and revenue expansion, all from one platform. Request a demo.